Several months ago, I changed my email address to stop spam. Since then, I have been updating every instance of my old address that I can find. In WordPress, I edited all of my theme files and updated my profile information in the “Users” admin area. Several days later while digging through the comments table in the WordPress database, I realized that the user-profile update is only pro-actively effective. There were still hundreds of instances of my old email address associated with comment-author information in the comments table. No big whoop for some, but the devastating inconsistency of it all would have kept me from a good night’s sleep (or maybe that was the caffeine..).

Oooh, shut up and fix it, then

To find my way out of this living nightmare, I began with a little research: a couple of quick queries to determine the total number of

Fun stuff. This query essentially replaces all instances of “old-email@address.com” with “new-email@address.com” within the “comment_author_email” field of the “wp_comments” table of the WordPress database. Thus, to drop this steaming little turd for yourself, replace both old and new email addresses with the real dealz. Also, if you are using a custom (i.e., non-default) WordPress table prefix (i.e., something other than “wp_”), you will need to edit “wp_comments” accordingly. As always, it is probably a good idea to backup your database before attempting any modification.

After running this query, all instances of your email address should reflect your new information. To double-check that everything went according to plan, rerun the queries for both old and new email info. If all went according to plan, your old email address should return zero results, and your new email address should return x number of results, where “x” is the sum of old and new email addresses determined above.

Hopefully this exercise will help others clean up old email information. The query can also be used for other “find and replace” operations. By using different query values, you can use this code to find and replace just about anything, anywhere! Amazing..

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Perishable Press is the work of Jeff Starr, professional developer, designer, author, and publisher with over 10 years of experience.
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